3,978 research outputs found
Information Leakage due to Revealing Randomly Selected Bits
This note describes an information theory problem that arose from some analysis of quantum key distribution protocols. The problem seems very natural and is very easy to state but has not to our knowledge been addressed before in the information theory literature: suppose that we have a random bit string y of length n and we reveal k bits at random positions, preserving the order but without revealing the positions, how much information about y is revealed? We show that while the cardinality of the set of compatible y strings depends only on n and k, the amount of leakage does depend on the exact revealed x string. We observe that the maximal leakage, measured as decrease in the Shannon entropy of the space of possible bit strings corresponds to the x string being all zeros or all ones and that the minimum leakage corresponds to the alternating x strings. We derive a formula for the maximum leakage (minimal entropy) in terms of n and k. We discuss the relevance of other measures of information, in particular min-entropy, in a cryptographic context. Finally, we describe a simulation tool to explore these results
Confidential Boosting with Random Linear Classifiers for Outsourced User-generated Data
User-generated data is crucial to predictive modeling in many applications.
With a web/mobile/wearable interface, a data owner can continuously record data
generated by distributed users and build various predictive models from the
data to improve their operations, services, and revenue. Due to the large size
and evolving nature of users data, data owners may rely on public cloud service
providers (Cloud) for storage and computation scalability. Exposing sensitive
user-generated data and advanced analytic models to Cloud raises privacy
concerns. We present a confidential learning framework, SecureBoost, for data
owners that want to learn predictive models from aggregated user-generated data
but offload the storage and computational burden to Cloud without having to
worry about protecting the sensitive data. SecureBoost allows users to submit
encrypted or randomly masked data to designated Cloud directly. Our framework
utilizes random linear classifiers (RLCs) as the base classifiers in the
boosting framework to dramatically simplify the design of the proposed
confidential boosting protocols, yet still preserve the model quality. A
Cryptographic Service Provider (CSP) is used to assist the Cloud's processing,
reducing the complexity of the protocol constructions. We present two
constructions of SecureBoost: HE+GC and SecSh+GC, using combinations of
homomorphic encryption, garbled circuits, and random masking to achieve both
security and efficiency. For a boosted model, Cloud learns only the RLCs and
the CSP learns only the weights of the RLCs. Finally, the data owner collects
the two parts to get the complete model. We conduct extensive experiments to
understand the quality of the RLC-based boosting and the cost distribution of
the constructions. Our results show that SecureBoost can efficiently learn
high-quality boosting models from protected user-generated data
XYZ Privacy
Future autonomous vehicles will generate, collect, aggregate and consume
significant volumes of data as key gateway devices in emerging Internet of
Things scenarios. While vehicles are widely accepted as one of the most
challenging mobility contexts in which to achieve effective data
communications, less attention has been paid to the privacy of data emerging
from these vehicles. The quality and usability of such privatized data will lie
at the heart of future safe and efficient transportation solutions.
In this paper, we present the XYZ Privacy mechanism. XYZ Privacy is to our
knowledge the first such mechanism that enables data creators to submit
multiple contradictory responses to a query, whilst preserving utility measured
as the absolute error from the actual original data. The functionalities are
achieved in both a scalable and secure fashion. For instance, individual
location data can be obfuscated while preserving utility, thereby enabling the
scheme to transparently integrate with existing systems (e.g. Waze). A new
cryptographic primitive Function Secret Sharing is used to achieve
non-attributable writes and we show an order of magnitude improvement from the
default implementation.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1708.0188
Privacy-Preserving Secret Shared Computations using MapReduce
Data outsourcing allows data owners to keep their data at \emph{untrusted}
clouds that do not ensure the privacy of data and/or computations. One useful
framework for fault-tolerant data processing in a distributed fashion is
MapReduce, which was developed for \emph{trusted} private clouds. This paper
presents algorithms for data outsourcing based on Shamir's secret-sharing
scheme and for executing privacy-preserving SQL queries such as count,
selection including range selection, projection, and join while using MapReduce
as an underlying programming model. Our proposed algorithms prevent an
adversary from knowing the database or the query while also preventing
output-size and access-pattern attacks. Interestingly, our algorithms do not
involve the database owner, which only creates and distributes secret-shares
once, in answering any query, and hence, the database owner also cannot learn
the query. Logically and experimentally, we evaluate the efficiency of the
algorithms on the following parameters: (\textit{i}) the number of
communication rounds (between a user and a server), (\textit{ii}) the total
amount of bit flow (between a user and a server), and (\textit{iii}) the
computational load at the user and the server.\BComment: IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, Accepted 01
Aug. 201
Experimental quantum key distribution with finite-key security analysis for noisy channels
In quantum key distribution implementations, each session is typically chosen
long enough so that the secret key rate approaches its asymptotic limit.
However, this choice may be constrained by the physical scenario, as in the
perspective use with satellites, where the passage of one terminal over the
other is restricted to a few minutes. Here we demonstrate experimentally the
extraction of secure keys leveraging an optimal design of the
prepare-and-measure scheme, according to recent finite-key theoretical
tight-bounds. The experiment is performed in different channel conditions, and
assuming two distinct attack models: individual attacks, or general quantum
attacks. The request on the number of exchanged qubits is then obtained as a
function of the key size and of the ambient quantum bit error rate. The results
indicate that viable conditions for effective symmetric, and even one-time-pad,
cryptography are achievable.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figure
Blind Reconciliation
Information reconciliation is a crucial procedure in the classical
post-processing of quantum key distribution (QKD). Poor reconciliation
efficiency, revealing more information than strictly needed, may compromise the
maximum attainable distance, while poor performance of the algorithm limits the
practical throughput in a QKD device. Historically, reconciliation has been
mainly done using close to minimal information disclosure but heavily
interactive procedures, like Cascade, or using less efficient but also less
interactive -just one message is exchanged- procedures, like the ones based in
low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. The price to pay in the LDPC case is
that good efficiency is only attained for very long codes and in a very narrow
range centered around the quantum bit error rate (QBER) that the code was
designed to reconcile, thus forcing to have several codes if a broad range of
QBER needs to be catered for. Real world implementations of these methods are
thus very demanding, either on computational or communication resources or
both, to the extent that the last generation of GHz clocked QKD systems are
finding a bottleneck in the classical part. In order to produce compact, high
performance and reliable QKD systems it would be highly desirable to remove
these problems. Here we analyse the use of short-length LDPC codes in the
information reconciliation context using a low interactivity, blind, protocol
that avoids an a priori error rate estimation. We demonstrate that 2x10^3 bits
length LDPC codes are suitable for blind reconciliation. Such codes are of high
interest in practice, since they can be used for hardware implementations with
very high throughput.Comment: 22 pages, 8 figure
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